The Age of Revolutions has always fascinated me. After I first learned about the French Revolution as a child, I promptly decapitated my Princess Jasmine Barbie for crimes against the Republic. (My mother screwed her head back on, thus allowing Princess Jasmine to elude revolutionary justice.) This time period, roughly 1774-1849, encompasses some of the greatest shifts in Western thinking, and transformations of Europe and its colonies so seismic that, when asked about the influence of the French Revolution, former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai is purported to have replied, “It’s too early to say .”

But for all these dramatic changes, these great increases of rights for the common man and citizen, the expanded world of the age of sail, it is one of the most whitewashed periods of history in contemporary culture. Period pieces—and the fantasies inspired by them—are pale as debutant’s white muslin gown. In the days before Hamilton suggested that people of color could own and be interested in the American Revolution as much as white students, I had the same historical vision of this time period as a 1950s Republican Senator. I had a vague understanding that the Indian muslins and Chinese silks Jane Austen characters wore had to come from somewhere, but someone like me, a mixed race kid with a Chinese mother and a white American father? I didn’t belong there. There was no place for me in this history.

We often see Asian stories adapted for a Western, English-speaking market, but Howl’s Moving Castle is one of the most famous cases of the reverse. Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 film is a loose adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 novel, which Jones described as “rich and strange, full of the most beautiful animation,” by someone who “understood my books in a way that nobody else has ever done.” Miyazaki deeply understands the work the novel does: using popular fantasy tropes to interrogate and disprove dominant social narratives, and thus deprive them of their power.

In adapting and translating the novel to a visual medium for a different time and for a different, primarily Japanese audience, Miyazaki took a fascinating approach: he focused not on faithfully replicating each detail of the novel, but preserving its work. The novel Howl’s Moving Castle uses fairy tale tropes as a means to examine societal roles and restrictions that hold people into certain positions as well as holding them back, and the magical power of language to break people out of them. Miyazaki, who began working on Howl’s Moving Castle with “a great deal of rage” about the US invasion of Iraq, approaches a standard war plot at angles and strange intersections, using fantasy tropes to show the ridiculousness and pointlessness of war and the magical power of human affection, connection, and compassion to transform.

Sewing is fantasy fiction’s least favorite activity. How many times has a Strong Female Character proved her agency and ability by hating her needlework? The heroine is not like other girls! She disdains embroidery; she likes to fight and ride horses, like boys do. In the Game of Thrones series, for example, fan favorite Arya rejects needlework for Needle, her sword. Plying her Needle becomes an elaborate joke on societal expectations for women in Westeros, at once a refutation and denigration of traditionally feminine activities, as well as a reflection of the fates of Arya and her more traditionally feminine sister Sansa in the first book. Sansa is imprisoned; Arya escapes.

Books are a curious paradox. They are, at once, both story and object. And one of the most compelling bits of paratextual material that confronts and engages with this conundrum is the footnote. Other paratextual materials can be more easily separated from the story or even ignored. There’s an old cliché about not judging a book by its cover, and the maps and illustrations in classic fantasy novels are often so expected they don’t always register as a way of guiding you, the reader, through the book.

Like maps, illustrations, and covers, footnotes frame the text. They also pause it. They offer a chance to step back from the narrative and dispute it, observe it, or explain it. Footnotes aren’t often found in fantasy, and because a footnote’s natural habitat is the academic text, footnotes bring with them implications of scholarly rigor, a sense of painstaking objectivity, or carefully grounded and continuing arguments in The Academy.